A short note on how to match non-greedily in Nvim/Vim.

Vim’s regex is slightly different from the usal regex we see. Vim use - to indicate non-greedy match, for example, to match non-greedily for a.*c, we can use the following search:

Note that \v is used to simplify the code. Otherwise, the command will become ugly and error-prone.

Here is a list of non-greedy syntax (the following assumes that \v is added):

• {-n,m}: match n to m previous pattern, non-greedy
• {-n,}: match at least n of previous pattern, non-greedy
• {-,m}: match 0 to m of previous pattern, non-greedy
• {-}: match 0 or more of previous pattern, non-greedy (non-greedy version of *)

For more info, read :h non-greedy inside Vim.